In August 2011 I purchased couchcommerce.com from somebody in Texas for $688. The name somehow stuck with me after I was discussing with friends to potentially build an e-commerce system based on CouchDB database technology one day. But we did not really follow up after realising that raising the money needed to build an e-commerce system from scratch was quite impossible in Germany.
Later that year touch devices and especially the iPad began to get traction and the term Couch Commerce became a synonym for shopping with your tablet. Motivated by this trend I initiated a project in December 2011 which eventually became a proper Startup with a great team, €1,5m in seed-funding from great investors and even customer traction.
On our way of raising a Series A we were then confronted with a hard choice: the one person that everybody in the e-commerce industry knows because of his two successful IPOs and basically inventing e-commerce (with Intershop) and then reinventing it by bringing SaaS to the enterprise (with Demandware) approached us. Why this turned out to be a hard choice? He did not want to invest like other VCs – he wanted to join forces and build a new company.
When you know our CouchCommerce team you will understand that we have an extremely strong culture and are very proud to work as a team and build CouchCommerce and the Sofa SDK. So letting that identity go naturally was a hard choice.
But we got to know Stephans great team and realised that his vision of a mobile retail platform was from our point of view a logical extension of what we were working on at CouchCommerce from day 1.
So today I’m proud to announce that CouchCommerce has been acquired by Stephan Schambach and we have joined forces under the name of NewStore together with a great very experienced team. This already has opened doors for our Hannover based team we would have not even dreamed of before.
As a joined team at NewStore we have been able to raise $38m and are on our way to build the mobile retail platform that will redefine commerce for leading brands and retailers all over the world.
To say goodbye to a great CouchCommerce journey and to welcome the NewStore future we have prepared the CouchCommerce story video for you:
In the name of the former CouchCommerce team I like to thank everyone we worked with during our three years journey very much! For us this is the beginning of a much bigger adventure and we are looking forward to it.
As pictures say more than words I have prepared some impressions from the last three years for you:
Alexander Ringsdorff 
Congrats Alex. I wish you and your team all the best for all the exciting things to come.
Thank you Jan!
Reblogged this on mediaAngel and commented:
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